The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #128220 Message #3096106
Posted By: Lighter
15-Feb-11 - 08:44 PM
Thread Name: The Advent and Development of Chanties
Subject: RE: The Advent and Development of Chanties
Here's a hard-to-fnd shanty text that must have been thought charmingly risque' when it was published in 1931, but whose third stanza, I believe would have been considered "unfit for polite ears" fifty years earlier.
On Oct. 13, 1931, the magazine supplement to the Brooklyn Sunday Eagle carried a human interest feature by O. R. Pilat titled "He Sings Old Sea Chanteys." The singer was marine engineer Alexander MacPhedran, 46, whose younger brother (not named) became a shantyman on board "Garnet" and "Hill of Glasgow" beginning about 1906. Alexander learned his shanties from him. Among them:
Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you.
Way, hay, you rolling river.
Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you.
Way, hay, we're bound away,
O'er the wide Missouri.
Missouri she's a mighty river,
She sets our topsails all a-shiver.
Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter.
She loves to do what she hadn't oughter.
Cf. this rhyme, collected early in WWII (from Edgar Palmer's "G.I, Songs"):
We love Mrs. Jones, we love her daughter,
We love her in a way we hadn't oughter -
Oh, it's home, boys, home, the place we ought to be -
Oh, it's home, boys, home, and to hell with the life on the sea.